4Q50 Judges b, Fragments 2-3, Reconstruction

Details

The biblical scrolls from Qumran have had a profound impact on our understanding of the development and transmission of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. Prior to 1947, scholars who studied the transmission of the text of the Hebrew Bible had access to the Masoretic Text handed down by scribes in Judaism since the second century A.D., the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament; and the Samaritan Pentateuch. All of these witnesses to the text of the Old Testament were preserved in manuscripts that dated well after the time of the composition of the Old Testament. The oldest complete Hebrew manuscript of the Old Testament prior to the discoveries at Qumran dated to around 1000 A.D. When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, manuscripts of the Hebrew Old Testament as old as the third century B.C. were among them—more than a millennium older than the best textual data known at the time.

While scholars have had access to the biblical scrolls material for decades in expensive print volumes, this biblical textual treasure-trove is available to everyone in morphologically-tagged searchable database. Aside from morphological searching, which enables scholars to detect and analyze morphological and grammatical differences between the Masoretic Hebrew text and the oldest textual witnesses to the Old Testament, this edition allows quick comparisons of the biblical Qumran material with other manuscript witnesses to the Old Testament.

The achievement of these resources is the result of years of painstaking work on the part of the following scholars:

Dr. Stephen Pfann is responsible for the transcriptions. Dr. Pfann, President of the Board of Directors of the University of the Holy Land, as well as Chair of the University’s Department of Qumran Studies, holds an M.A. from the Graduate Theological Union and a Ph.D. from the Department of Ancient Semitic Languages at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The morphology was the work of Dr. Michael Heiser, Academic Editor at Logos, earned his PhD in Hebrew Bible and Semitic Languages at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Andrew Perrin, who is currently a graduate student at McMaster University, and Bradley Marsh, who is currently a graduate student at Oxford University.